If this is you, it isn’t the end but only the beginning of something better.
Understanding Brand Collateral Design
You can add new vigor to your current brand or rebrand altogether. Here are a few tips to consider as you do that:
Highlight your Company’s Message Using Proven Design Methods
Look at how successful businesses handle design. This will help you decide on what to do for your company. Eye-popping color schemes, promotional items, website designs and more are all worth checking out.
You won’t have to go very far to find excellent examples of collateral design in businesses. Whether you check out Nike, McDonald’s, Target or Bass Pro Shops for starters, you’ll find quality collateral in every way within those companies.
Websites, print advertisements, television commercials, social media and more are all done with the highest quality possible. These days, you don’t need millions to create a great design. Doing so is now within every careful business owner’s grasp.
“These days, you don’t need millions to create a great design.”
Just don’t forget to stop and learn something from successful businesses as you continue that journey.
Creating Collateral that Helps Tell your Story
More than ever, quality marketing ads and collateral are only part of the picture. How does your customer decide if you’re just a business that’s only driven to make lots of money or a team that passionately offers solutions to problems that they have? That’s where storytelling comes in.
Video or print interviews from customers who’ve been helped by a product or service are powerful. You can use storytelling in video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and more. Everyone loves a good story.
Stories make customers think, “If they benefited so much, maybe I will, too.”
Storytelling provides marketing without customers feeling like they’re marketed to. At its best, it also educates and informs.
Creating Collateral that Increases Opportunities to Be Shared
If you capture your audience’s attention with great design, they will pay attention. If you include a great experience along with the design, they will share with their immediate circle.
“There’s no better way to cultivate potential customers than creating opportunities for them to share.”
More and more businesses are incorporating great deals or contests into their collateral to encourage customers to share them on social platforms. You can do the same and benefit in the same way.
Choose Quality Over Quantity
Quality over quantity is what you want for your design. Quality is essential when deciding colors, video storyboarding and production, interactive content and other collateral aspects.
If your collateral design is poorly done, you will likely never see many of the customers that you were hoping to engage. This is because they were not impressed with their first exposure to your company.
It may have been due to conflicting color schemes, poorly written content, or video advertisements that weren’t relevant to their needs. Even cheap quality paper used in a brochure or business card can damage the impression made.
“Even cheap quality paper used in a brochure or business card can damage the impression made.”
Customers think that if care wasn’t taken to produce high-quality marketing, the product that is being offered may be of low quality as well. Unfortunately, many customers DO judge a book by its cover.
Make sure that whatever your customer sees of your business is of the highest quality even if you must scale back on the volume of marketing that you do at first.
Summing It Up
If you feel the need to rebrand, you’ll find yourself in good company. Some of the most successful businesses have, at one time, change their name (and changed it back), revised their design, updated their color schemes and modified their message.
Change is necessary to stay relevant in an ever-changing world full of customers with new and unique needs.
Adding life to your collateral design and re-branding will give you the edge that you need to succeed.